The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

January 11, 2015

Rochelle Owens

Rochelle
Owens [USA]

1936

Rochelle Owens
was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 2, 1936, the daughter of Maxwell and
Molly (Adler) Bass. As a native New Yorker, Owens studied at the New School for
Social Research (now The New School) before attending the University of
Montreal.

After a brief marriage to David Owens, she
married poet George Economou on June 17, 1962.

Her
first work of poetry, Not Be Essence That
Cannot Be was published by Trobar in 1961; over the next few years, Owens
would devote more of her time to drama, writing several plays that helped to
establish her as a pioneer in the experimental Off-Broadway Theater. In 1965,
her The String Game was performed at
Judson Poet’s Theatre (published by Methuen in 1969), and the same year, the
Tyrone Guthrie Workshop Theatre in Minneapolis and Café La Mama Theatre in New
York presented what came to be her best known work, Futz. Since its premiere, that play has become an underground
classic of the American avant-garde and an international success. Toronto
banned it, an Edinburgh paper dubbed it "lust and bestiality play,"
but New Yorkers queued around the block when it was first produced in the
sixties. In 1969, it was made into a film, which has attained a cult following.

Meanwhile, she continued to publish
poetry, several of her early books attaining notable attention, including Salt and Core, I Am the Babe of Joseph
Stalin’s Daughter: Poems 1961-71, Poems from Joe’s Garage, The Joe Eight-Two
Creation Poems, The Joe Chronicles II, Constructs, W. C. Fields in French
Light, and How Much Paint Does the
Painting Need. More recent works include Black Chalk, Rubbed Stones and Other Poems, New and Selected Poems,
Luca, Discourse On Life And Death,
and Out of Ur: New & Selected Poems
1961-2012.

Her work has also appeared in a wide of
range of anthologies of drama and poetry. She has also written a fiction, Journey to Purity (2009).

Owens has won many awards, grants, and
honors, including Village Voice Obie Awards (in 1965, 1967, 1982), a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Fellowship
at Bellagio, and an ASCAP Award.

Owens has taught at Brown University, the
University of California-San Diego, the University of Oklahoma, and the
University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette).